When I first met UML – way back in school, in 1999 – I instantly liked it. It looked cool, it was new and it went pretty well with Java – which was new too. Until then and for a long time after that programming was taught with Clipper, Turbo Pascal and such, Java was not that popular until, if I remember well, 2002. In 2001 I read the Gang of Four book the first time, and dived into patterns. Not too effectively of course, and definitely not using it right at all, but we all start somewhere, I think.

Since then I tried to educate myself, keeping up with the new stuff – which means buying a lot of books from amazon, and reading the interweb s. Hungarian publishers are not – or at least were not – too mad about this technology stuff, except when it comes to programming languages. The Gang of Four Design Pattern book took 9 years to publish here in Hungarian. But I digress.

I try to stay up to date, and try to make people improve where ever I go – especially with the “before coding” phases of the project, requirement gathering, design, etc. And then I like tools too. That’s why when Yanic asked if I would do a review of his Trace Modeler application I instantly said yes. And will publish the review the next week. But in the meantime I had a sudden idea – if I have this blog, why not write about UML an it’s use as I see it? I am reviewing a modeling tool that uses UML notations, so I could go a bit into the notation parts too. At the least, there will be some content on the blog. At the most some people get ideas.

It’s my blog, I work with UML, so noone can prevent me doing that. In the next couple of weeks – or, considering my writing speed, months – I will run a series of posts about UML and related stuff.